I'm, like, not bein' judgy, I'm just sayin'. A (2) Random Randomnesses column.
“Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”. Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it”. -Elizabeth Powell/Ben Franklin
Dear Gentlereaders,
Are you familiar with the fictional town called Pottersville, formerly known as Bedford Falls?
Without getting out of bed I can fire up one or more of several competing sports betting apps and gamble away my fortune...alright, my limited resources, but still.
Or, I can roll out of bed, get dressed, head outside, and walk about 100 yards due north from my front door to a convenience store and choose to buy beer, wine, or "hard" iced tea, lemonade, etceterade from a relatively small but fairly representative selection of alcoholic beverages.
On the checkout counter there's a display of colorful cardboard tickets, scratchcards, with easily removable coatings for sale ranging in price from one to twenty dollars each. By removing the coatings, by "scratching" the cards, you can participate in instant gratification gambling games run by the State of Ohio, which by law, has an exclusive monopoly on this sort of thing.
Behind the counter, multiple brands of various and sundry nicotine delivery systems are on display that come with government-mandated warning labels, nicotine being a highly addictive substance that kills a lot of people in the long run. Both nicotine delivery systems and alcoholic beverages are sin taxed by both the State of Ohio and The Fed'rl Gummit. Both products also come with a sales tax mandated by Ohio and the City of Hooterville.
If I wanted to access a much larger selection of alcohol, scratchcards, and nicotine delivery systems I could continue to walk or drive north over a small bridge into downtown Hooterville and pay a visit to my local Giant Eagle supermarket.
There's an entire aisle devoted to wine, a beer department, and a store within a store, a "State Store," where liquor is for sale by the State of Ohio which benefits from a monopoly on same as well as the requisite sin and sales taxes.
I can also bet money on the daily number, daily numbers actually, as I can bet on 3, 4, or 5 numbers twice a day, seven days a week.
{Even on Sundays?}
Well sure, why not? We go to great lengths to separate church and state in this country, Dana, even in solidly Team Red states like Ohio. Besides, I'll wager that any given day of the week is somebody's sabbath day in our 24x7x365 culture.
There are daily, weekly, and national progressive jackpot games available as well. Don't forget, ya gotta play to win!
Ohio has four real casinos, i.e. ones that include table games and scantily clad cocktail waitresses, as well as seven "Racinos" that are pretend casinos attached to race tracks where there are no "free" drinks available from very modestly dressed cocktail waitresses.
There's a racino a 10-minute drive due south from my driveway.
Racinos all come with Ohio lottery terminals disguised as slot machines (no table games allowed) where you can pretend to be playing real slot machines. You've probably heard the house always wins? In this case, the house is the State of Ohio.
All winnings on all of the above-mentioned games are subject to local (yeah, I said local), state, and federal income taxes.
Heavily taxed and regulated weed is also available for sale in Ohio; there's a "dispensary" about a 15-minute drive from my house and others are coming online. I'm told that street weed is cheaper, but I don't know if this is true as I'm so old and boring that I don't purchase either alcohol or weed nowadays.
Many convenience stores sell legal "delta"-8, 9, or 10 forms of weed, that I don't much about, that will allegedly get you high but our five-foot-tall governor and the Ohio Legislature have sworn they're gonna put a stop to that soon.
Certain synthetic recreational pharmaceuticals, for the more adventurous among us who like to roll the dice and ingest substances concocted by who knows who and who knows where, are illegal, but may be purchased "under the counter" if one knows where to shop.
Others are perfectly legal, till they're not. See, there's an entire industry devoted to inventing new products by tweaking a molecule here or there and creating a substance that must be evaluated by the powers that be before being added to the official list of prohibited substances.
Ain't technology great?
Unlike in Pottersville, there are no venues in Hooterville with marques advertising Girls! Girls! Girls! However, there are all sorts of places in Ohio where one can view women (and I assume men) partially or fully nude. I understand they're heavily regulated and there are different rules depending on whether or not a given performer's genitals are on display.
I've never been to one although I confess to having visited bars featuring "topless" dancers while briefly living in Texas in the course of my misspent youth, which was, unfortunately, a very long time ago. I'm so old and boring that if I walked into a joint featuring totally naked female dancers I'd be too embarrassed to stick around.
I'm so straight that if I walked into a joint featuring even partially naked male dancers I'd vacate the premises ASAP.
{So, is there a point to all this verbiage?}
Nope, I'm just sayin'. I'm just puttin' it out there for the consideration of my gentlereaders. I'm not bein' judgy.
I recently accidentally discovered that Patrick Cadell is dead, but Sidney Blumenthal is still very much alive, and I, you're semi-humble correspondent, have willingly begun interacting with AI technology for the first time.
I thought that Mr. Cadell was the one officially credited/blamed for the Permanent Campaign concept which I've written about at some point in the murky past. But according to Wikipedia, Mr. Blumenthal is. I went a'-googlin' and discovered that both men are credited/blamed to one degree or another by all sorts of people as you might expect given the nature of the WWCK (the Worldwide Web of Contradictory Knowledge), which is how I came to consult Perplexity.
{Wait-wait-wait. I've perused the preceding paragraphs twice and still have no idea what...}
Puh-leeze! It's my schtick as you well know, or should by now. And now that you're intrigued, I shall proceed and all will be revealed. It's but one of the reasons my millions of gentlereaders love me.
As anyone who has ever gone a-googlin' is aware, the Goog's search results seem to have a tendency to favor advertisers and often seem to reflect the progressive political positions of Google's bosses and minions. They're also full of contradictory and/or out-of-date responses.
I've always wondered why there was no mechanism in place to at least delete out-of-date material. Google's hard at work on updating their cash cow but Perplexity is...well, I asked Perplexity, "What is Perplexity?" and it replied that "Perplexity is an AI-powered (my emphasis) search engine that combines advanced language models with real-time web searching capabilities to provide comprehensive and accurate answers to user queries."
{Cool, thanks for clearing that up.}
Long story short, there's a free version without ads (for now at least) that works waaay better than Google. I'm not going into detail as to why I think that's true, just merely recommend that my online gentlereaders check it out. Perplexity succinctly explained why two different people are credited with the permanent campaign concept without choosing a side, provided the sources it used, and didn't throw a million contradictory links at me.
I'm impressed, and this old crank is not easily impressed.
Apropos of not very much but for the record, I communicate with it by typing in my queries on a keyboard connected to a computer as I much prefer to use my phone, as a phone. I realize that "resistance is futile" and privacy is dead, and far be it from me to object to my fellow H. sapiens' apparent eagerness to become cyborgs, but talking to machines creeps me out for reasons that many of my fellow geezers/geezerettes (and some younger weirdos) will understand.
I'm sure you've seen news stories about people developing relationships with an artificial intelligence of some sort. I don't want to have a "relationship" with a computer program, I don't even want to be just good friends with one.
In the meantime, back to Messrs Cadell and Blumenthal.
I blame both of these guys for the fact that whoever the current POTUS happens to be, as well as most members of both houses of Congress, campaigning never ends.
Perhaps you've noticed? Professional pols...
[Professional Pols: career politicians, often with minimal real-world work experience due to the fact they consciously chose to be career politicians.]
Professional pols...
(Particularly at the federal level since term limits are an unachievable dream given that for some mysterious reason there's an excellent chance of getting "lucky" playing the stock market or via assorted investment opportunities while selflessly serving the Citizens of the Republic.)
Professional pols who have embraced the Permanent Campaign strategery govern with one eye always on the polls. The way they go about governing isn't primarily motivated by what's best for the country, it's done while always keeping track of which way the political winds are blowing to ensure reelection... or that a cushy job will be waiting if reelection fails.
From Wikipedia: "Strategies of this nature have been in active development and use since Lyndon Johnson, where priority is given to short-term tactical gain over long-term vision. The frenzied, headline-grabbing atmosphere of presidential campaigns is carried over into the office itself, thus creating a permanent campaign that limits the ability of policies to deviate from the perceived will of the people (hence, intensive polling."
The Founding Pasty Patriarchs, many of whom were intimately familiar with those dusty tomes written by ancient Pasty Patriarchs that contained their thoughts on politics and history gave us a democratic republic, not a democracy (if we can keep it) to avoid certain problems. Your semi-humble correspondent has previously summed up these problems by pointing out that if 51% of the citizenry voted to murder the other 49% there might be downsides.
But as my late wife used to say, there's always a bright side. If the people we send to the Swamp are preoccupied with divining the "perceived will" of the people why don't we just get rid of them all (think of the money and time we'd save!) and use our smartphones to vote for a national CEO to run things who we can vote out of a job whenever we don't like the results and get a new one?
We could enjoy all the benefits of having a temporary king/tyrant/dick-tater. What could go wrong? Just Sayin'.
Colonel Cranky
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